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Recent Broward Law Blog Features

Sunday, April 19, 2009

The Nation's Most Liberal Court Challenged by Bush's Appointees

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has been resolving disputes for 150 years in a region once prone to settling differences with pistols. Despite today's decorum, ideological gunfights still blaze.

Anyone who has lived on the East Coast has heard about the Ninth, and their forward thinking opinions most find too radical, and higher courts find too shocking. They get reversed a lot. It is the nation's most liberal court and has for the last eight years been a target of Bush judicial appointees.

So here is a thoughtful piece from the L.A. Times that is worthy of your review and consideration. It is a vast judicial circuit with conflicting ideological issues, and has crafted scores of challenging decisions that laid new ground for bold caselaw and gutsy thinking. As I go back and forth to my small northwestern California apartment, I only wish over the past thirty years in Florida a few courts were more like these. Instead, we have made case law here by fighting oppression that never should have been. In Northern California, they look at oppression, as well, oppression, instead of the operative way. Here is the article:

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Words of Wisdom

“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”—United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)